


Know that water's sweet

by Mere_Mortifer



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: (I mean that Richie enjoys being bitten), Adult Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood, Blood Drinking, Blood Drinking As Foreplay, Blow Jobs, Character Turned Into Vampire, Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier Bantering, Explicit Sexual Content, Flashbacks, Frottage, Human/Vampire Relationship, Light Angst, M/M, Movie: IT Chapter Two (2019), Mutual Pining, No Underage Sex, Oral Sex, POV Richie Tozier, Painplay, Pining, Porn with Feelings, Purple Prose, Resolved Sexual Tension, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Smut, The plot has been constructed to justify the porn, Vampire Bites, Vampire Eddie Kaspbrak, Vampire Sex, dangerous blowjobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:21:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27192334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mere_Mortifer/pseuds/Mere_Mortifer
Summary: “I keep ruining your shirts,” Eddie had said when he first brought up the cons of neck-biting. Richie figured he was giving that new excuse a try, because last time he had told Richie that he’s a monster andyou shouldn’t let me do this to you, especially not on your neck!Richie had shut him down immediately. “My mom said you can’t get blood out of cloth.”“Yeah, well, your mom doesn’t know jack shit. Lemon juice will do the job,” Richie had replied, but offered his wrist to Eddie all the same, shirt sleeve safely rolled up his forearm.Or: Pennywise turns Eddie into a vampire. Richie helps.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 25
Kudos: 261
Collections: Fic In A Box, Monster Reddie





	Know that water's sweet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).
  * Inspired by [i crave nothing but the taste of you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25270855) by [onceagainoncemore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onceagainoncemore/pseuds/onceagainoncemore). 



> Reeby, you said you like communication by snark, get togethers, and vampires. This also has a dash of kidfic in the form of flashbacks, and Eddie being a feral little gremlin to Richie's delight. Thank you for giving me the excuse to write vampire Eddie! I hope you enjoy it :)
> 
> A quick note: there's no underage sex in this, but the flashback that takes place during Chapter One could be seen as...sexually charged? Sensual? Nothing really happens, but I just don't know how to make vampire bites not seem horny as hell. You can skip the _July 1989_ scene if that's not your cup of tea.

_Now_

Eddie is acting weird. 

Then again, Richie is also acting weird, but he blames his fumbling with the chopsticks on the sudden reminder that he’s been in love with that hypochondriac little shit his entire life. He doubts Eddie has the same excuse.

His meter of judgement right now is the other Losers, eating and laughing and reminiscing around the table of this tacky Chinese restaurant (décor aside, the food is excellent) (which is why Eddie’s lack of appetite is suspicious) (Richie really, _seriously_ needs to stop staring at him). Stan is still, Richie now remembers from his childhood, the most well adjusted of them all, even with his pale face and shirt pushed down low over his wrists; Bill is all smiles and bright eyes and red cheeks from the teasing about his books. Bev and Ben—dear Lord, Richie can’t even look at them, they’re so gorgeous. It’s like staring into the fucking sun. If Richie had to guess, he’d say they’re both in the midst of some awkward flirting. Mike is also acting suspicious, alternating between looks filled with love and relief, and something much, much darker. 

But who knows what spending twenty-seven years alone in Derry does to a man, right?

The point is that, overall, this seems like a very happy, long-time-coming, I-can’t-believe-I-forgot-you-were-my-home middle school reunion.

Except that Eddie isn’t eating—but he looks so, so hungry. 

▼ ▼ ▼

Frankly, it’s hilarious that Richie thought he could sleep tonight. 

He’s been tossing and turning on the shitty Townhouse mattress for what feels like hours (just twenty minutes, his phone informs him), mind split between his recovered memories, the ones that are still missing, and a loop of _Eddie, Eddie, I want to be closer to Eddie._

He looks good, all grown up. Richie thinks back to his teenage years spent lying awake, picturing round cheeks and skinny legs instead of the sharp angles he saw in Eddie earlier tonight (his doe eyes are the same though, and those were always Richie’s biggest weakness), so sick in love he couldn’t even bring himself to slide one hand in his underwear, still stuck on the impossible fantasy of being allowed to hold Eddie’s hand. 

There’s something else, though—a sense memory, of being touched by him; of...intimacy? Pain? The edges blur together. Richie figures it’s all part of his lost years rushing back into his brain, like Mike opened a dam with just two words ( _It’s back_ ), and now all that he held for Eddie is pushing at the forefront of his mind, begging for attention, mixing together. 

It makes sense. Loving for Richie has always been tangled from the pain it caused him.

“Dude, shut the fuck up,” he groans to himself, already sick of his own dramatics. One dinner in the presence of his middle school crush and Richie is suddenly back to mentally composing shitty poetry about him. Unbelievable. 

He’s convinced himself to retrieve his earphones from his bag—and if not to fall asleep to some calming music, then to at least rest as he listens to it—when he hears a knock on his door. 

The residual trauma of those fucking fortune cookies makes Richie yelp and do a little jump in place like a startled cat—if it’s Pennywise outside the door, he’s glad It missed the scene. He can still die with _some_ dignity left. 

“Richie?” comes a whisper after the knock, and the familiar voice helps with getting his heartbeat back to normal. 

He takes the few steps to the door and opens it to reveal a pajama-clad Eddie, coordinated flannels and all. The pants are a light blue, and rolled up at the ankles at least twice, and possibly the sexiest thing Richie’s ever seen in his fucking life. 

Eddie has always had the power to make Richie so damn _stupid_. 

“Aw, do you have a little floppy hat to go with that?” Richie asks, pointing at the adorable, oh my _God_ , outfit as he makes room for Eddie to enter. “One of those handheld candle-thingies?”

Eddie fixes him with a deadpan stare that would make Stan proud—the impressive eyebags Eddie is sporting (they looked less severe at the Jade, and Richie would know, because he put a lot of effort into _not_ staring at Eddie’s face the entire time and failed miserably) help with the overall look. “I’m not a character from A Christmas Story, Richie, so no. I don’t have a _handheld candle-thingy_.”

“If it’s not to show off your Dickensian night apparel, why are you here at…?”

“Almost 2 am. It’s not that late, asshole. Aren’t you usually out partying or some shit at this hour, Mr. Hot Shot Comedian? Fuck, I can’t believe someone let you become _famous_.”

Of all the reactions one could have to being insulted by a Wall Street bro _asshole_ who drives an _Escalade_ and owns coordinated PJs like a _child_ , pure joy and a hint of arousal shouldn’t be too high on the list—or so Richie guesses—but, to be honest, it explains why Richie’s spank bank is filled with scenarios of twunks calling him names. He’s not surprised Eddie was the blueprint for that particular sexual fantasy. 

As he’s having that realization, a memory of Eddie in high school flashes through his head—him stretching with the rest of the track team on the side of Derry’s circuit with Richie and Bev hollering at him from the benches. Knee high socks and beat up sneakers; shorts rolled up at the waist because Eddie didn’t tell his mom he made the team, and had to use the clothes provided by the school during competitions. _Shorts_ , man. Shorts and the theoretical possibility of a jockstrap hiding underneath, those used to be the bane of Richie’s existence during the hormone-soaked years of his adolescence—but something else, too. Again, something in the back of his mind struggles to be deciphered, remains nothing more than the phantom feeling of lightheadedness and _danger_. 

“Oh, so you came here just to insult my career, got it.” Richie closes the door behind him, and goes to sit on the edge of the mattress. “I am not out partying hard every night, by the way. Because I’m fucking _forty._ ”

Eddie sits down heavily next to him, and presses one hand to his stomach with a grimace. “You are?” he says, “The receding hairline totally didn’t clue me in.”

Richie pinches his arm with mock offense, and it gains him a prissy slap on the hand that makes him snicker. “Fuck you, dude. You’re one to talk—do you have acid reflux or something?” 

But he knows that can’t be it, because Eddie didn’t touch anything at the restaurant, no matter how many times he moved things around in his plate to give the illusion he was eating. If there’s one reason for Eddie to be clutching his stomach like it pains him, is that he’s hungry. Starving. He definitely looks it. 

Eddie smiles without a hint of humour. It turns softer when he tilts his head to look at Richie—apologetic, like he’s embarrassed about something, or about to gently break to him some bad news. “I wish,” he says, and then, “I’m just not used to this—this feeling, anymore. I forgot it used to hurt.”

The wall that Mike’s call started breaking cracks some more. _Something_ pushes forward, eager to be recalled.

“What used to hurt?” he asks, feeling dazed.

Eddie sighs, grimaces again. “So you don’t remember yet,” he says, “what Derry does to me?”

And then the wall crumbles down. He does. He does remember.

▼ ▼ ▼

_July 1989_

Richie is scared awake by a rattling outside his window. 

He startles and sits up on his bed before he really knows what’s happening, his sleep thin and troubled by nightmares (memories) of Neibolt. There’s already sweat gathering at the nape of his neck, his legs tangled in the sheets like he’s been tossing and turning far longer than the noise outside his window has been going on. 

He can’t see much in the dark room, and what he can see in the little moonlight filtering between the gap in the curtains makes no more than a blurry watercolor of Richie’s godawful eyesight. He shoots one hand to his bedside table, grasping at his glasses, the muscle-memory of the gesture guiding him through the motion while all he can think is _It found me, It found me_ —like the only thing stopping Pennywise from killing him in sleep, all these past weeks, was a lack of access to a phone book with the Tozier’s address in it. 

The thought of the clown squinting at the pages, one finger following the text as he read through the names ( _Taylor...Thompson...Tozier!_ ) is not comical enough to override the terror dampening his neck, sweat soaking through his pajama shirt. 

Something thin and pale latches onto the window sill again. Richie couldn’t move if he tried.

And then two big dark eyes peer into the room, and relief washes over Richie so fast he can feel his legs turn to jelly. It’s just _Eddie_ , Eddie’s hand knocking insistently on the glass, Eddie’s round face appearing every few seconds as he jumps up and down to get enough height for Richie to see him. 

He usually climbs right in. Richie’s woken up more than once to a warm body sliding under the covers when the night was terse and silent. “Go back to sleep,” Eddie always says, “it’s just me”—and not once has Richie asked him what he was doing, or why he didn’t go to Bill’s, who lives closer to his house, in fear that it would break the spell. He’s just started leaving his window unlocked when he goes to bed. 

It’s closed today. Sleep eludes Richie even more without that layer of protection from the outside world, never mind that he knows it’s nothing more than a placebo—and it’s not like he held hope Eddie would be able to escape his house these days. Not with the broken arm.

He’s happy to be proven wrong. 

Richie stumbles out of bed, the sheets fighting him all the way, and the happiness at having Eddie waiting for him fades back to fear when he sees the state he’s in. 

He looks feverish, trembling from head to toe despite the summer air, heavy and damp. Richie unlocks and opens the window to let him in so fast he gets a splinter in his finger, but the sting barely registers when Eddie looks on the verge of death. 

“Dude, what _the fuck_ ,” Richie whispers as he helps Eddie get in the room. It’s not only the arm cast that makes the job difficult—Eddie’s uncoordinated, like his three working limbs aren’t cooperating much more than the broken one. He almost falls on his ass when he swings his legs over the window, but Richie, hands already clutched firmly on his wiry shoulders, keeps him upright. “What’s going on? Are you sick? Do I need to call my mom?”

Eddie looks at him with alarm. His eyes look sunken, the skin around them paper thin. “No! No, please, I just—I wanted to see you.”

Warmth floods to Richie’s face, despite the last tendrils of terror and his worry for Eddie. “Well, here I am,” he says, and it’s all he can do not to cringe at himself. Now’s not the time to be fucking _awkward_. “Here _you_ are. At—” he glances at the alarm clock”—3 am. Looking...Jesus, Eds, no offense, but you look like shit.”

Eddie rolls his eyes (cute) and sways on his feet (not so cute). Richie gently but firmly pushes him towards the bed, because there’s a high chance Eddie’s about to topple over, and Richie would love to avoid giving him a concussion to go with the bone fracture. He sits down next to him, hands on his lap to hide that they’re shaking—from the abrupt awakening, from the ache of seeing that sickly paleness on Eddie’s face _._

“Eds, I mean it,” he blurts out after a minute of just watching Eddie regain his breath, “you’re scaring the shit out of me. Did—did you take something?”

Eddie turns to look at him like he’s insane, and that, at least, is familiar territory. “You think I’m on _drugs_?”

“I don't know! With all the fucking pills Mrs. K makes you pop on the daily, I wouldn’t be surprised!” 

Richie goes to turn on the bedside lamp, because this is not shaping up to be a conversation to have under the moonlight, but Eddie whines pathetically and grips his hand, stronger than Richie thought him capable of in this state. 

“No light,” Eddie rushes to say. The white of his eyes shows in a bright circle around his irises—for a second Richie’s scared they will turn yellow, and he immediately feels guilty for it. This is _Eddie_. An Eddie with something very wrong with him, sure, but still Eddie. “Please. It makes my head hurt.”

Suddenly he’s on the verge of tears. It’s worse than the thought of this being another one of Pennywise’s dirty tricks. 

“It’s okay, it’s fine, we can stay in the dark,” Richie reassures him, his own voice filled with panic. “It’s no problem. Eddie, Eds—what is going _on_?”

“I have no idea.” The tears in Eddie’s eyes spill over, his lips are wobbly, and he looks scared, and Richie hasn’t felt this helpless since he was kneeling on a rotting wood floor yelling for Eddie to look at him. 

“Well, what—” He scrambles for words. “What hurts? Is it your head? You can’t sleep?”

Eddie shakes his head. “I’m _hungry_.”

Hungry. Richie’s suddenly so filled with rage he can feel his face burn hot again. “Is your mom not fucking _feeding_ you, now?”

“No, that’s the problem,” Eddie says, and his fingers tighten some more around Richie’s hand, which he’s still holding—not that Richie will point it out. That might make him pull back. “Since Neibolt, it’s like...like all food has gone _bad_ , no matter what I eat. It all tastes like ash—and I can’t hold it down, if I take a bite, then I’m throwing it up one minute later. Water, too. My mouth’s always dry like it’s filled with sand, even if I drink and drink an drin—”

Oh fuck, now it’s Richie’s turn to worry about throwing up.

“ _Eddie_ ,” he rushes to say, “stop, stop, you’re spiraling. Fucking _breath_. Okay? Breathe with me.”

This, Richie can do. It’s not the first time he works Eddie down from a panic attack (they’ve always been panic attacks; Eddie doesn’t have asthma), and he works through the familiar motions of getting Eddie’s breath to sync with his. He has no idea how to help Eddie with the real problem, but at least he can do this. 

Usually it takes Eddie a few minutes to relax, for the _oh God I can’t fucking breathe_ feeling to pass. This time something different happens. 

After the first few deep breaths, Eddie’s face smooths over, a blank slate of pale skin. Richie observes him silently for a second, unsure if this is progress or not, so he notices Eddie’s eyes dropping to Richie’s hands clutched in his the second it happens. He bites back the instinct to slip it out of his grasp before Eddie can do it first. 

It’s not what happens, though. 

Eddie exhales all at once. “You’re bleeding,” he says, voice barely a whisp, cold fingers moving to turn Richie’s hand over. 

Confused, Richie tears his gaze away from Eddie’s mouth, lips dry, a flash of teeth when he lets them part, and looks down. He is bleeding—right, the splinter from the window. It’s barely a cut, the pain was minimal and has already faded. 

“I’m fine, it’s literally nothing,” he reassures him, but Eddie ignores him. He raises their joined hands closer to his face, seemingly transfixed by the small drop of blood staining Richie’s finger, and with each passing second—in which Richie doesn’t know how to react—Eddie’s breath speeds up again, fast and shallow like he can’t suck enough oxygen in, and his grip around Richie’s hand becomes a vice. 

And then he does something that makes Richie feel like he’s being electrocuted. He licks up the length of the finger, eyes fluttering shut, and sucks hard on the tip, where the small cut from the splinter is. 

Goosebumps ripple over Richie’s skin. He feels like he’s burning from the inside out, the heat from Eddie’s tongue and lips spreading from his hand up to his already flushed face and, mortifyingly, down between his legs. His first two instincts contradict each other: he wants to pull back, because sucking on your best friend’s fingers is objectively _a weird thing to do,_ and it’s so very out of character for germophobic Eddie Kaspbrak—but another part of him, the one that has started looking at Eddie differently, scared to touch him and elated when Eddie does it first, _wants_ this. Whatever this is. 

In the end, the choice is taken from him. Before he can remind Eddie that actually no, wood splinters don’t inject venom, what the hell is he trying to _suck out?_ , Eddie moans low in his throat—a sound of relief, unguarded—and pushes Richie down on the bed. 

It punches the breath out of him. Eddie climbs on top of him like he forgot where and who they are—his eyes stay closed even as Richie lets out a startled _what the fuck?_

He doesn’t kick his legs out or try to push Eddie off him, because try as he might he can’t convince his body that he _actually_ wants to stop this (he doesn’t, he likes Eddie’s weight on him, his bony knees digging into his thighs). The best he can do is curl one hand around Eddie’s shoulder and half-heartedly try to keep him at a distance. 

“Eds, dude, it definitely looks like you’re high as a kite,” he says, voice breaking. 

Eddie slips Richie’s finger out of his mouth and presses his nose to Richie’s wrist instead, breathing in sharply—and really, there’s no better word for it, Eddie is sniffing him. There are traces of blood on his lips that Richie can see only because Eddie is so deadly pale in contrast. 

Eddie ignores him, _again_. The weirdest part about all this might be that he hasn’t bitched once about the use of the nickname—then again, Eddie usually reserves the theatrics for when they have an audience. 

“Can you say fucking _anything_ , please?” Richie snaps, remembering only at the last second to keep his voice low. He really, really doesn’t want his parents to walk in on _this_. He pinches the skin on Eddie’s neck, hoping it’ll snap him out of whatever trance he fell in. 

It works. Eddie’s eyes snap open, and he flinches away with a hiss. His grip on Richie’s arm stays painfully tight, though, and when he trails his gaze down to Richie, it’s with pupils blown so wide they look like pools of spilled ink. “I think, I—just let me—” he says, voice thin, overwhelmed, with a faint lisp on the _just_.

A lisp? Eddie’s never had a lisp. If one wants to talk as fast as Eddie does, one also tends to have perfect diction. The words sound awkward in his mouth, like a kid with a mouthful of braces, or like Stan did last year when for Halloween he wore fake teeth for his vampire costume. 

Wait. _Wait_. 

“Oh my God, oh fuck,” Richie gasps, “You—Eds—your fucking _teeth_.” 

He can see them now, the sharp points of his canines far longer than they were minutes ago, so close to the skin of Richie’s wrist, and Richie instinctively tries to wrench his arm free once again. Eddie doesn’t let go and instead ends up sprawled over Richie’s chest. 

Richie’s heart is jackrabbiting so fast he hears the beat of it up in his throat. None of what is happening right now makes _any fucking sense,_ but he’s resigned himself to a summer of pure maddness already. This is something else, though—a murderous clown, he can rationalize, but his best friend with sunken eyes and razor sharp teeth pinning him to the bed? No. No way. A line has to be drawn _somewhere_ , right?

It’s difficult to focus on Eddie’s face so close. Richie’s nearsighted, so his glasses only make things worse—he can only vaguely distinguish the brown of his eyes before Eddie lowers his face, and hides it in Richie’s neck. 

“Can I?” he asks, still sounding completely out of it. His hot breath fans across Richie’s skin, sending shivers up and down Richie’s neck that seem to go on forever. 

Okay, so. Eddie is a vampire. This is vampire behavior, right here. Is he asking Richie if he can drink his blood? Is that what’s happening?

“Please, Rich,” Eddie says. He licks a stripe up his jugular.

“Oh, fuck,” Richie repeats. _That is totally what’s happening._ He squeezes his eyes shut against the frankly _unacceptable_ amount of stimuli he’s feeling at the moment (the cold tip of Eddie’s nose his arm cast digging in Richie’s ribs their stomachs pressed together) and tries to think. Please, Eddie said, but does Richie...does he want…

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” A slightly hysterical laugh leaves him. “Do your worst, Count Chocula.”

Of all the ways he could bite the dust this summer, Richie figures, Eddie sucking on his neck surely can’t be the worst. 

And then there are teeth piercing one of the main arteries in his body, so he doesn’t think about much else for a while.

▼ ▼ ▼

_Now_

“Holy shit,” Richie whispers. He pushes his hands through his hair, mouth hanging open, as that feeble sensation of _something missing_ disappears, and freshly unearthed memories replace it. “Holy shit, dude, what the—a fucking vampire, Eds?” 

Eddie rolls his eyes, a hint of humour in the curve of his lips. “How is this _any_ more shocking than all the other shit we went through that year?”

Richie sputters. “Oh, I’m _sorry_ if I need a minute to process this information!” 

That first night during the Summer From Hell is the most vivid, but soon, other scenes rush to the forefront in his mind—he sees Eddie slowly grow up through them, sees him in the winter of 1983 when the bad stuff was supposed to be over but real food still tasted like dirt; sees him at sixteen wiping Richie’s blood off his mouth with that ecstatic expression he always got after he fed; sees him ashen and sad the week after senior year of high school ended, not because he was hungry, but because he would leave for New York come morning.

All those years in which Eddie grew up on Richie’s blood, _because_ of Richie’s blood. And Richie let him, because Richie liked it—that Eddie refused to accept help from anyone else, even when Beverly finally figured out why he’d stopped eating lunch at school or sharing ice creams with the rest of the gang, and Richie had to explain the truth to the Losers because Eddie refused to. 

The guilt Eddie felt. The panic at the idea he’d have to survive on something dirty and dangerous like blood for the rest of his life, _he,_ who Sonia raised to believe just touching hands with the wrong people could be deadly. It doesn’t escape Richie why Pennywise would choose that particular way of tormenting a kid like Eddie—not when It happened to wake up during the height of AIDS outbreaks in America. It was all over the news constantly. Eddie was _terrified_ of somehow catching it (thank you, Mrs. K, for your excellent parenting).

How did she convince Eddie to move to a place like New York? Richie’s surprised he just didn’t let himself _die_ , forced to find someone to feed on in a city full of strangers. He should have stayed with Richie—or Richie should have followed; or something else, they could have found a way to figure it out. Instead he stayed behind for the whole summer before he left Derry to never return, devastated when Eddie didn’t call, not even once (like Bev hadn’t, like Stan hadn’t, like Ben hadn't) and feeling stupid for holding hope. 

Well, now at least he knows the reason for _that_ heartbreak. 

“Wait, how—” Richie pushes his fingers under his glasses to rub at his eyes. “Have you been living as a vampire this entire fucking time? Just...robbing fucking blood donations centers, no idea who the fuck did this to you—or was it your wife? Does she _know_? I mean, how couldn’t she, unless—Eddie. Eddie, do you _kill people?_ ” 

Eddie blinks twice, watching him from the edge of the bed he’s still perched on (Richie had apparently started pacing at some point. His brain feels a little fried). “I try not to. Not too often, at least,” he says.

Uh? _Uh?_ Richie feels his face contort into a mildly terrified expression. “ _Dude_ ,” he whispers. 

They stare blankly at each other for a few more seconds. And then Eddie laughs, kind of mean about it, and Richie likes him so, so much. 

Nevertheless, that was a dick move. “You little shit. If I had a locker, I’d shove you in it and steal your lunch money.”

Eddie just snickers some more. He still looks like he hasn’t slept in a month, but the smile is genuine. “You fell for that so hard! Fuck, man, _your face_.”

“You look so punchable to me right now.”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Eddie says with an eye roll, “you feel threatened by my superior comedic timing. No need to turn into _Hockstetter_.”

“Fuck Hockstetter,” Richie responds with no hesitation, even though he’d forgotten about Patrick’s existence until Eddie mentioned his name. “He was such an irredeemable asshole—didn’t I almost convince you to kidnap him to keep him as your live snack in seventh grade?”

“Patrick died in the sewer, dumbass. You’re talking about another kid, the one who used to make fun of me when Mom made me skip P.E. Or maybe it was, _whathisface_ , Liam Webb? I don’t know, dude, you wanted me to murder a whole bunch of people at the time.”

“I was going through a dark phase.”

“Oh, right, your dark phase. When you forced to Bev to paint your nails black _three fucking times a week_ for a month.”

“Shut the fuck up, I looked _so sexy_ as wannabe punk, I peaked that month,” Richie argues, and for good measure kicks at Eddie’s shin. Eddie retaliates by almost punching him in the dick. “Stop dodging the question! Who’s been giving you transfusions this whole time?”

“No one, fuckface,” Eddie says. “I’m like this only when I’m in Derry.”

Oh. Oh! Richie knew about that, too. 

▼ ▼ ▼

_March 1993_

A phone rings. 

"It's for me!" Richie yells from his room (he's not sure it's for him) and rushes down the stairs before his mom can leave the spot on the sofa and pick up the landline.

His socks slide on the floor, but Richie has mastered the _Risky Business_ move two painful months after the movie came out. Or maybe someone out there is looking out for him and doesn't want him to lose teeth the same day Eddie promised to call after his brief vacation to Bangor with his mom. 

" _Vacation_ , yeah, that's a way of describing it," Eddie had said a couple of weeks earlier, when he found out what was in schedule. "We have to go for my aunt's _ninetieth birthday_. I've never even met her! And old people _smell_. Can you go in my place?"

Richie had put on a faux pensive expression. "It depends. Is she hot?" he'd said in the end, which pissed Eddie off, and then Richie took a too-long drag of his cigarette just to hear him go on a tirade on why Richie will die young, like a fucking idiot. 

Eddie was only gone for three days, but they passed as slow as molasses without him to bother in class, and Richie missed him. Like, objectively way too much. 

He's excited to finally hang out again, that's all—also, a tiny (massive) (no, ladies, he really means _massive)_ part of him hopes that three days without feeding means that Eddie will be all over him. Eddie’s forced Richie to start using a syringe to take out some of his blood, because random puncture wounds were starting to be hard to explain the closer to summer they got, but maybe now he will be desperate enough to grab Richie and bite him wherever. Suck on his skin, leave bruises.

When he picks up, he does his best to hide the trepidation he feels. “Hello, you called Casa de Tozier! How can I help you?”

“Richie—”

Richie feels himself go cold. Eddie’s voice, crackling through the phone speaker, is weak and thin and fucking _miserable_.

Richie made him sound like that once, when he was younger and even more of a shithead. A few months into his friendship with Eddie, he’d figured out that taunting him would grant him Eddie’s full undivided attention, and one day he’d gotten too greedy, had made Eddie cry in frustration. He remembers seeing those gigantic brown eyes (Eddie used to be so frail, in those years; he had the proportions of a new-born doe) and feeling his own water in response, like Eddie being in pain meant that Richie has to share part of it. He’d apologized profusely, and swore, in that brutal honesty typical of very young children, that he’d never, ever made him cry again, because friends can’t make other friends sad. 

And that was the last he’d heard Eddie’s voice wet with frustrated tears. Even in the summer of 1989, all Eddie had done was be loud. 

What got him so down now? What could be worse than Pennywise?

“Eds? You okay, man?”

“No,” comes the response, even more strained. “I—fuck, Richie, I thought it was gone. But now I’m back in this _fucking_ town, and it’s back, too—"

Richie waves both hands around, the phone pressed between one shoulder and one ear, even if Eddie can’t see him gesticulate. “Whoa, whoa, dude, slow down. What’s back? What was gone?”

Eddie’s breath hitches. With a pang to his heart, Richie pictures big, fat tears streaming down his face, hot trails filled with anger. “The hunger! The thirst! It’s _back_!”

The terminology is familiar—Eddie tried explaining to him what it feels like to crave blood, and he’d never found a better word to replace either hunger or thirst. _It’s something bigger,_ Eddie told him once, _uglier,_ and Richie hadn’t known how to tell him that he understood, at least a little, so he offered Eddie his wrist to drink from instead. 

“You mean that leaving Derry—you were back to normal, in Bangor?”

“Yes,” Eddie sobs, pained like he hates letting those hurt sounds pass through the line. “I swear it was like as soon as I saw the _Come back soon to Derry!_ sign I started thinking how much I was in the mood for French fries. And when I ate at my aunt’s house, the food tasted good, like _really_ good. I scarfed down three servings of cake, mom even started lecturing me about diabetes when she noticed. And I didn’t even care! The cake was amazing!”

Richie gently thunks his forehead to the kitchen wall, holding the receiver close to his face the way he would like to hold Eddie’s hand. He imagines the scene—Eddie’s eyes lighting up when the food didn’t taste like ash in his mouth, nose smeared with cream, taking bites too big for proper etiquette. 

The smile dies on his lips. “But now that you’re here French fries don’t sound too good, right?”

A sigh makes the line tremble. “No. I hate this fucking town. You...can you come over? It hurts, Rich. I had already forgotten how much it can hurt. I need you.”

And fuck, Richie knows he’s a selfish bastard, but those words feel good to hear.

▼ ▼ ▼

_Now_

“Okay, that’s—that’s good,” Richie says, pushing a hand through his hair. “You’ll go back to normal as soon as we get out of here.”

“Yeah, it was nice of It to include that caveat,” Eddie scoffs. “That’s why I was so eager to leave earlier. But Richie, if I promise to stay…”

Richie just looks at Eddie, at his big brown eyes staring somewhere behind Richie’s shoulder like he can’t bear to hold eye contact. His heartbeat picks up; he can feel it in his throat. _Is this going where I think it’s going?_

“If you promise to stay, what?” he repeats. _Please, please, of course, you just have to ask—_

Eddie wrings his hands together, swallows like it pains him—his lips are dry, shadows darkening under his eyes. “I need to feed,” he says in the end. “And you, you were the only one I...Can I? Not much. Not more than when we were kids.”

Those unspoken words, there in the middle of Eddie’s request, go through Richie like a zap of electricity. He sits down next to Eddie on the bed, feeling weak at the knees—this, someone shouldn’t be allowed to feel like this so long after teenagehood. Hasn’t puberty been cruel enough the first time around?

“Okay,” Richie only says, because _of course_ seems too eager. 

Eddie frowns like the answer wasn’t satisfactory. “Okay? That’s it? I could kill you.”

“You just said you wouldn’t, dipshit,” Richie replies with a smile. He feels color rise up to his face and, mortified, he turns to sit with his back to Eddie in an attempt to hide it. “Come on, don’t make it weird. Just go for it.”

Richie can feel the hot gusts of his breath hit his neck as Eddie stalks closer. 

He remembers this moment, the tension that'll break with his skin when Eddie's guilt finally loses to his hunger, and his teeth will sink deep, find the veins, suck the blood out with his shaking hands grasping tight on Richie's shirt. 

There's something about Derry that makes Richie feel thirteen again—or maybe he never quite managed to keep at bay his unrelenting need to be touched, to be wanted, because now as it was then, Richie wants it more than Eddie probably does.

It made him feel so special, that Eddie would feed on him and him only—even, or maybe especially, when he needed more than Richie could safely give. He'd have let him take everything, as a kid, no questions asked.  
Death terrified him when he stood in front of It, but with Eddie, pale face and red mouth, unwilling to ask, desperate to have it, Richie would have let him drink and drink and drink until all of him was cursing through Eddie's veins. And, well, he had tried his best to hide it, but Eddie's pointy little fangs digging in his neck, or his wrist—the desperate, relieved moans he let out at the first taste of blood—always got Richie hard after he hit puberty. 

It wasn't even something in Eddie's saliva that acted as an anesthetic, to keep his prey meek and pliant, that made the process pleasurable. It was just...him. His mouth on him, his nimble fingers leaving bruises on Richie's arms, he used to hold so tight as he fed. 

"You sure?" Eddie asks, voice thin. 

Richie doesn't say anything. He tilts his head to expose the line if his neck, and thinks back to how Eddie had started biting him on his wrists, later in their teenage years, and Richie could never figure out if he liked being able to watch him do it, that way, or if he mourned the intimacy of having Eddie's face tucked in the hollow of his shoulder. 

“I keep ruining your shirts,” Eddie had said when he first brought up the cons of neck-biting. Richie figured he was giving that new excuse a try, because last time he had told Richie that he’s a monster and _you shouldn’t let me do this to you, especially not on your neck!_ Richie had shut him down immediately. “My mom said you can’t get blood out of cloth.”

“Yeah, well, your mom doesn’t know jack shit. Lemon juice will do the job,” Richie had replied, but offered his wrist to Eddie all the same, shirt sleeve safely rolled up his forearm. 

He prays that Eddie doesn't question his choice—after all, a mark on the neck is more difficult to hide, it gets in the way of things—and fortunately he doesn't. He just scoots over, and then his fingers, cold and soft, tug at Richie's collar to expose more skin. His eyes fall shut; he wonders if Eddie can feel the thunderous beat of his heart. If he thinks it comes from fear. 

"You were the only thing that kept me alive, I think", Eddie says, quiet and grateful.

Richie swallows, but his mouth is dry; it ends up being a painful drag against his throat. ”Eh, it was nothing. What’s a little blood sucking between friends?”

He can feel Eddie smile against his neck, shake his head (fondly? Was that a _fond_ head shake?), but he doesn’t add anything. His breathing has picked up to a fast and shallow rhythm, the way that used to make Richie wonder, in moments like this, if Eddie was on the verge of a panic attack or if he was just losing himself to the scent of blood. 

Richie never had the presence of mind to ask. That line of thought happened only when Eddie was very close to biting him, and if that wasn’t distracting enough, then the piercing pain of—

Eddie bites him. 

Richie hisses and clenches his hands around the sheets so hard a couple of his fingers pop. Eddie’s teeth slide in deeper, and the warmth of his mouth masks the feeling of blood flooding out—not that Richie is kept wondering, with the way Eddie moans at the first taste, like he was fucking dying before and now that he’s sucking hard on Richie’s neck all is right with the world again and _fuck_. Fuck, Richie hasn’t gotten this hard this fast in decades. 

He forgot just how much this does it for him. One of Eddie’s hands presses on Richie’s chest and drags it up, slowly like he’s not even realizing he’s doing it, and the hint of pressure on his throat has Richie throbbing in his pants like a teenager.

He waits a few more seconds, overwhelmed. How the fuck did he ever find the strength to stop Eddie? Right now he can barely care if he lives or dies. 

Some sort of survival instinct kicks in not long after, though.

"Eddie, Eds," Richie gasps, head swimming. It still feels incredible, Eddie's torso flush with Richie's back, his mouth on his neck, but Richie's head is swimming in a way he'd learned to recognise, as a kid, as the moment between helping a friend and risking his life for him. Not that he ever minded, one way or the other. "You need to stop, buddy, pretty sure Mike needs all six of us tomorrow— _Eddie."_

Finally, Eddie pulls back with a gasp. His long canines slide out of Richie's skin with a rip, and Richie yelps more in surprise than pain. One of his hands shakes when he instinctively presses it to the still-bleeding wound. 

"Fuck, shit, Rich, I'm so sorry," Eddie is saying, panicked. "You okay? I didn't remember it being—so intense, fuck—"

Richie twists his torso to face him, and really, there's not much to do to hide the hard-on tenting his jeans. The light-headedness might as well come from all his blood rushing to his dick instead of out of his neck. Richie has to hope that Eddie is too high on his post-feeding rush to notice it. 

“Chill the fuck out, Eds, I’m _fine,”_ Richie reassures him, and he’s only partly lying. The bite stings, but it barely registers on the list of bad things Richie has let happen to his body in the past two decades or so. The loss of contact with Eddie hurts more. 

Eddie frowns, and looks up from under his ridiculously long lashes at Richie, pupils blown wide, lips bloody and swollen. Richie’s dick strains harder against the fly of his jeans. 

“Stop trying to look _cool_ , you can fucking tell me if I hurt you, I know I went too far! I’m gonna go get my first aid kit, if nothing else then just let me...disinfect. The wound. Uh, Richie?”

Oh, shit. Fuck. He noticed. 

Richie forces a smile, and very pointedly does not follow Eddie’s eyeline. Which points down, between Richie’s legs. “Yes, sweetcheeks?” 

Eddie’s eyes flicker back up. “You’re hard.”

“Ah! Yes, I am, thank you for pointing that out.”

This is how he dies. Not at the hand of a murderous clown from space, which to be honest doesn’t sound any more dignified, but mortifyingly aroused (and arousingly mortified, if he’s honest, who knew he was into humiliation) ( _Richie_ , Richie knew) in bed with the love of his life. Who happens to be a vampire. 

His life yesterday seemed _so_ normal. 

“You weren’t hard before,” Eddie points out, inquisitorial tone like he’s trying to solve a complex math problem. “And you’re hard now.”

Richie hums. “Sorry, I started thinking about Mrs. K to distract myself and, you know, I’m not made of stone—”

“Shut up a second, Rich—”

“I’m rock hard, sure, but I’m not made of _stone_ —”

“Richie!”

“You yelling at me does not help with the situation, by the way—”

“Oh my God, dude—”

“I’m gay.”

It just sort of...tumbles out. Not that there were many other explanations for him popping a boner when a guy started sucking on his neck, but still—one would think, with how many years Richie has refused to say the words to another living soul, they’d get stuck behind his teeth more easily. 

There’s one long moment of silence in which Richie contemplates the pros and cons of suffocating himself with one of the Townhouse’s flat pillows, and then Eddie wipes his mouth and says, “Oh. Alright.”

Richie blinks. “That—that’s it, _oh_?”

“Well, what the fuck do you want me to say? Congratulations. Thank you for telling me. I’m very proud of you.”

The fear in Richie’s chest melts away. “Those are,” he tries to reply, and finds himself giggling like a schoolboy, stupid with _relief_. It’s not that he expected Eddie to react _badly_ , obviously, but Richie’s sexuality has been since the start tied very closely to his feelings for Eddie, who was the first boy he looked at, _really_ looked at, and remained the only one for most of his formative years. _I’m gay,_ as far as confessions go, is only one step away from _I love you_. “Those are all very nice things to say, yeah.”

Eddie’s expression softens, legs now crossed on the bed to face Richie. “I’m sorry, Rich. You know how I get after feeding, I’m a bit—loopy. I am glad you told me.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Don’t make a big deal out of this or I’ll cry.”

“Okay, we can—” Eddie waves a hand around, pokes with his tongue at one of his elongated canines, “—move on, I guess. From this monumental news.”

A huffed laugh escapes Richie. He shifts uncomfortably in his jeans, willing his dick to lose interest in the conversation. “ _Monumental_ ,” he repeats, “‘cause I always hid it so well, right?”

Eddie frowns. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Come on, buddy,” Richie says, throwing caution to the wind, “you think this is the first time I enjoy you biting me _a little bit too much?_ ”

“What?” Eddie asks, and again, with more fervor, eyes black in the darkened room, “ _what?_ I swear, Richie, if you’re fucking with me…”

Richie starts sweating cold, feeling feverish with old fears. He opens his mouth to say something, turn it into a joke, but words don’t come. He just looks at Eddie and wishes it wasn’t still so easy for this man to hurt him. 

“Holy shit,” Eddie murmurs, “you’re not fucking with me. You _liked_ me, back then?”

Nothing to say. A shameful nod. 

There’s always a moment, after asking for permission and before growing teeth, where Eddie seems to shift into something predatory and dangerous. Richie watches as the paleness takes over his face again, blood still staining his mouth. 

“And now?” Eddie asks.

This could go either way, Richie figures—Eddie is on the verge of something, and Richie can’t decipher what he wants to hear. _No, I can’t, I’m not supposed to know you anymore. Yes, of course I do, how could I ever stop._

He settles for glancing down at the erection still straining his jeans. Eddie’s eyes follow, unflinching, so dark. “Okay,” he says, slowly, and Richie still doesn’t know what it means, that Eddie cared to ask, that he’s here on this bed, taking shallow breaths like he can’t fill his lungs. 

Richie swallows against the lump in his throat. He spreads his knees slightly more open. 

“Does that mean—will you—I won’t say it.” Eddie’s eyes reflect the sliver of moonlight peeking through the curtains. “I won’t say it, but can I do something?”

“To me?” Richie asks on a whisper. 

Eddie’s lips quirk up in a smile, and it softens the angles of his face enough for Richie to see a glimpse of the boy hiding behind the wasted years. “To you.”

“Yes, then”—as if there is any other answer he could give, really. 

Eddie's hands fall to Richie's belt. That's enough to send Richie sprawling on his back. 

He shuts his eyes against the onslaught of shivers that having Eddie's cold, nimble fingers where he most needs them brings. 

"Oh, wow, going for the kill. You don't need to do this," Richie hears himself say, because he's an idiot. If he knows Eddie—does he still?—then too many worried questions about whether he is _sure or not, seriously, Eddie-bear, wouldn't you rather go rest?_ , will turn him off completely. 

"I was fifteen," comes the answer, a complete non-sequitur, "the first time I thought about doing this. Get my mouth on you—in a different way, I guess. I was getting my mouth on you plenty, back then." 

Richie's breath, already weak from the circumstances and the blood loss and Eddie's touch, rushes out of him like a weight just dropped on his chest. Fifteen. When he was fifteen Richie accidentally put a pair of Eddie's shorts in his own bag after PE and he spent two months resisting the urge to bury his face in them and breathe in, before one day he forced himself to give them back. And Eddie was in his own home, fantasizing about...about what? Sucking Richie off? 

Oh, _God_. 

"So yeah, I don't _need_ to," Eddie continues. The belt buckle finally gives in, and the zipper of his pants follow through, the heavy fabric of his jeans pushed down his thighs impatiently. "I want to. I remember now just how much."

"Jesus fucking Christ, Eds," Richie whispers to the ceiling. He thinks of ways to finish that sentence. He comes out empty handed. 

The stubble growing on Eddie’s jaw scratches Richie’s skin when he nuzzles Richie’s sensitive inner thigh. 

The knowledge itself that it’s Eddie, _his_ Eddie, sprawled between Richie’s open legs like they do this every day, like this was not a fantasy Richie’s ran dry as a teen, is enough to make Richie’s head swim—then he feels the wet drag of his tongue, and he’s just...gone. Eddie could ask him right now to murder whoever for his entertainment and Richie would ask _weapon of choice?_ And then he’d fucking do it. He’d kill someone for this man. He swung a bat at a demonic clown, once, for this man. 

His teeth are still elongated, tiny sparks of pure white in the room, and Richie's stomach goes taut at how dangerous this is. Sex has always felt like getting flayed raw, one way or another; Richie constantly in his head, unable to relax completely— _is it okay if I kiss him? How do I tell him I don't want to stay after? Why does his name feel wrong?_ The vulnerability of it was terrifying, something Richie had to ignore whenever the touch-starvation got the best of him...and on an endless cycle he went, the want, the need, the disappointment.

This is different. This is Eddie, with Richie's blood on his mouth, with his teeth sharp and hungry, touching Richie where he could hurt him the most. And instead of the nausea Richie is used to, he finds himself trembling with every press of Eddie's tongue through fabric. 

This is possibly the most dangerous thing he's ever done, killer clown non-with-standing.

The knowledge makes his cock twitch under Eddie's mouth.

"I thought—this didn't feel good at all, as a kid, by the way," Eddie murmures, almost to himself. Richie raises on his elbows to look at him, and finds Eddie with his eyes fluttered close, mouthing lazily on the head of Richie's cock, boxers straining obscenely.

"What—sucked a lot of dick back in the day, Eds?"

Eddie's eyes fly open, and Richie feels the sting of his fangs. He yelps, more in surprise than pain, and sits up straighter.

"Eddie! Fucking watch it, that's precious cargo!"

"I meant this hunger, Richie," Eddie says, ignoring all complaints. Richie finds the juxtaposition between his ridiculous Bambi eyes and the blood smearing his lips indecent, which only serves to make precum dampen his underwear farther, right under the warm gusts of Eddie's breath. He's still so close. He's not touching him anymore, but he's still so close. "It used to feel like—I don't know, one second I was fine, and the next it was like I hadn't touched food or water in weeks. It was torture."

Richie nods. "I remember. You scared the shit out of me everytime, I used to think one day you would just die on me. You alwasy waited until the last fucking second before asking for help."

"Because I didn't exactly enjoy hurting you, you idiot," Eddie snaps, and undermines the words immediately by hooking his fingers in the hem of Richie's boxers and tugging down. Eddie wraps one cold hand around Richie's erection before Richie can process that he's about to get his dick sucked down for real, after all, which sends his already withering brain functions flying out of the window. "But it’s not so bad now. Have you really _always_ liked it?”

Richie huffs a laugh. “Getting bitten by you? Or the way you used to lick my neck right before?” The only answer he gets is Eddie licking a strip up his cock, and Richie chokes on his words. _Is this really happening?_ “Or—fuck, or how right after you would fuss over me? It always took half an hour to convince you I was fine.”

“Call me fucking crazy, but sometimes I was worried that I’d just sucked my best friend _dry,_ asshole—”

“I’m waiting for you to suck me dry right now— _ah, fuck!”_

Eddie smirks around the mouthful of Richie’s thigh he’s suddenly biting. He’s not pushing hard enough to pierce the skin—not yet.

He gently pulls back when Richie whimpers, possibly mistaking the sound for genuine pain, and not Richie’s brain cells dying at the sight. His mouth makes a soft, wet sound when it leaves Richie’s skin. “Stop talking about me sucking your dick. And stop _looking at me_ , while you’re at it,” he says, “it’s making me self-conscious.”

“N _ooo_ , don’t go all shy on me,” Richie coos, fighting against a smile that feels too soft, too fond, and pats Eddie’s hair. ”Is that what you tell your wife when you don’t wanna eat her out? ‘I’m sorry, babe, not tonight. I’m feeling the existential dread of being perceived by others.”

That gets him a _real_ bite on his inner thigh, the tips of Eddie’s sharp canines ripping the skin just enough for blood to swell out—which is 100% what Richie was angling for, so, _hurray_. 

He falls back on the bed with an _oomph_ , his fingers spasming for a moment before he sinks them again in Eddie’s hair. Pleasure shoots up his spine so fast and intense it almost startles him, sharper than he’s used to, all stemming from the pain and suction of Eddie’s mouth. Eddie’s barely touching his dick, just one hand lazily curled around the base, and yet Richie is mortifyingly close to finishing already. Maybe it’s because he’s spent most of his teenage years chasing this exact feeling, desperate to have Eddie want him, _need_ him enough to just let go and hurt him, just a little, just enough. 

“Okay, that’s, fucking _stop_ ,” Richie rushes to say. He doesn’t want this to end so soon. He hasn’t even seen Eddie naked, _what the fuck_. “I’m gonna come, Eds, _Eddie_.”

Eddie makes a noise of annoyance, muffled by Richie’s thigh because he’s got his whole fucking face smushed into it like he wants to eat him alive. Richie pushes himself up on shaky arms in time to see him pull back, red over his teeth and chin, eyes at half-lid and unfocused. He looks just about as devastated as Richie feels. 

“I don’t want to hear you talk about my wife ever again.” He tilts his head to rest his forehead on Richie’s leg, and drags his tongue up the bruised and bloodied skin he just bit until it’s clean and shiny with spit. “I’ll fucking kill you.”

He doesn’t sound like he means it. 

"Uh uh," Richie says. "Deal. Literally whatever you want."

Eddie laughs. He still sounds high as a kite, but his eyes turn bright and present when he looks up at Richie, a dangerous glint there that Richie is used to seeing, that he remembers as one of his favourite Eddie-related things from his childhood. Letting Eddie drink from him has always felt like a special ritual—not only because of the obvious, but because it was the one time they both had an excuse to be completely vulnerable with each other. 

Eddie laughs again, breathless. "You're so into this, dude, fuck."

Richie has no rebuttal, not when Eddie says the words as he leans closer, now up on his knees to get leverage. There's still blood on his tongue, and his teeth are still long and dangerous when he licks up Richie's cock. He furrows his brows as a drop of precum leaks right over his lips, and he tentatively curls his tongue around the head, searing hot, stained a cherry red. 

He lets Richie cup his jaw with one hand and press his thumb, brief and gentle, on the point of one of his teeth before letting go. Heart in his throat, scared of opening his mouth because _who fucking knows_ what’ll come out if he does, with Eddie touching him like Richie didn’t believe he ever would, he watches as Eddie takes him deeper in his mouth. He can’t close his lips around Richie’s cock without puncturing the skin, but the drag of his tongue is good enough. And the view, God, Eddie looks good from this angle—how could he not? With those eyes, so big and sweet compared to the rest of his face, all sharp angles; he glances up at Richie once, just as he curls his tongue around the head of Richie’s cock, and he pulls back until he can suck on the tip, fangs just a dangerous hint of how badly he could hurt him, if he wanted. 

It knocks the breath out of his lungs. Eddie’s mouth is wet and hot—Richie would never associate the word messy to him, usually, but feeding knocks something in Eddie loose. Saliva drips down Richie’s shaft everytime he parts his lips to suck in a breath, and soon Eddie’s hand joins in the effort to, Richie suspects, make him come his brains out. 

It’s working, that’s for sure. Between the intense focus clear in the wrinkle between Eddie’s eyebrows—like sucking cock is a particularly difficult spreadsheet to decipher, or whatever the fuck rysk analysts do—the faint throbbing of the bites on his neck and thigh, and Eddie’s fucking hand and tongue working him over, Richie is on the brink in minutes. 

He decides he needs to come with Eddie laying on top of him or he’ll die. 

“Eddie, _Eds_ ,” he begs, trying to push him off and closer at the same time. “Come up, come here—”

Eddie obeys the insistent tugging of Richie’s hands on his shoulders. He climbs on the bed and follows Richie down, down until the cool sheets are under Richie’s back and all he can see is Eddie’s flushed face above him. “What now? I was having fun,” Eddie says, and has the audacity to pout. 

Richie kisses him. They hadn’t done that yet—it feels like righting a wrong. He kisses him until all he can taste is the iron of his blood, until he pierces his tongue on Eddie’s canines and he’s left gasping from the pain and pleasure. 

He’s lightheaded, his chest aches anytime Eddie shifts on top of him and they find a new way to fit together—in loop in his mind, _we fit we fit we fit_ and _I love him I love him I love him_. Is this what it was supposed to feel all along? Another body weighing on his chest, and it feels like this is the first time he can breathe properly.

“I want you like this,” Richie murmurs against Eddie’s lips. His hands fumble with the waistband of Eddie’s pants, unwilling to let him up long enough to see what he’s doing. Richie's still painfully hard, and when his aching cock touches the naked skin of Eddie's hip he almost sees white. Eddie's fingers still feel cold, a bit unresponsive when he tries to push his pants and boxers further down his thighs and out of the way—his nose, too, cold where it brushes on the bridge of Richie's own, knocking the glasses out of place. Richie smiles, even if it makes it hard to kiss Eddie properly, but it's that or bursting into tears from the tenderness that fills him to the brim. 

"I don't know if that—” Eddie’s eyes flutter shut when Richie gets rids of the last of his clothing and takes him in his hand. “Oh, okay, yeah, I take that back." 

He shifts under him until their hips line up, and slides his cock on the underside of Eddie’s until they’re both groaning and falling back into a kiss. Richie, already so close to the edge he’s struggling to keep his eyes open, holds back, wanting to feel Eddie come first. His abs tense under Eddie’s cold hand, which rests on his stomach, under the thin layer of his sleep shirt. The wound on his neck keeps trickling blood, he can feel it soak the pillow, slowly but surely, but Richie doesn’t have it in him to care—he’s watching Eddie, watching his parted lips as he pants and shakes under Richie’s touch. 

It’s not long before he comes all over Richie’s hand, and Richie keeps stroking both their cocks just to see Eddie shiver in overstimulation before dropping his head to Richie’s shoulder. Richie follows over the edge soon after, the feeling of Eddie spent and trembling over him too overwhelming to drag this out any longer. 

He relaxes on the mattress like they unplugged him. Eddie raises his head, big eyes half-lidded, and smiles at Richie all sweet and satisfied. His teeth are back to normal, all signs of blood licked off them by Richie’s tongue—if it wasn’t for the marks still throbbing on Richie’s neck and his thigh, you couldn’t guess how dangerous the man sprawled on his chest can be.

Wow. This really, seriously happened. It’s still happening _right now._ Richie’s breath gets stuck somewhere in his throat. 

“Eddie—” he tries to say, willing those three overused words to just leave his lips. _I love you. I’ve been loving your shadow for more than two decades. You for even longer._

Eddie’s smile turns softer. There only faint traces of red left are over his chin, on the corners of his lips. “It’s okay, Rich,” he says, and lays his head down on Richie’s chest. His heart is going a mile a minute, and it only picks up when Richie realizes Eddie is actually listening. “I know,” he simply adds, “me, too.”

Could it be this easy? So many years spent like he was missing a limb, like some vital part of him was lost and missing—how is it possible that he’s getting everything he’s ever wanted now, in this dusty hotel room, in the town that has hated him for so long and that he hated right back?

This seems like a gift Richie won’t get to keep for long. If that’s the case, so be it: he’ll have tonight; he’ll have Eddie’s warmth on his body as they sleep. Tomorrow can wait. 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic fought me all the way to the end, but it's finally here, and I fully embrace all the corny lines I ended up keeping. Let me know in the comments what you thought, even an inchoerent keysmash if very much appreciated :D Thank you for reading <3


End file.
